This week in the Slacktiverse, January 4th, 2014

(posted and compiled by chris the cynic, written by members of The Slacktiverse)

The Blogaround

These past few weeks have been full of a lot of activity for Storiteller. She reflects on the emotional and mental whirlwind that’s been the half-year since her son was born in Six Months Gone By and provided a brief update on her son’s first Christmas in Home for the Holidays. On a less positive note, she contemplates her frustration with herself and how to deal with it more productively in And you ask yourself, “How did I get here?”.

chris the cynic wrote:

I wasn’t sure what my internet access would be like, and I had THOUGHTS on the game Long Live the Queen, which Ana recently did a Let’s Play of, so for most of the week I had automatically scheduled a series of posts on that:

The first post, which was mostly to say that while the other posts were on things I thought could/should have been better I did in fact like the game, a lot. It also serves as kind of an index with links to the other posts at the bottom.

Unfortunate Implications, which talks about the problem with how the game’s possible endings (presumably unintentionally) set up a message that to get rights for non-straight people means destroying a country or two.

Inconsistency, which was about how several times the game would set up something up (“In situation X, Y will be possible,”) only to fail to follow through (“X just happened; what do you mean you want to do Y? Well we didn’t program for that, so no.”)

The lack of flavor convos, which was about how having a conversation mechanic but only letting you use it when PLOT demands hurts the game.

Why I didn’t know how my internet access would be was that I went to Vermont, and so got a post with pictures out of it where I talk about snow, frost, sledding, corn, exploding tires, imploding tires (ok… leaking tires, but after “exploding” saying “leaking” sounds anticlimactic), the 1957 version of The Snow Queen from Russia, getting stranded, what happens to kids when they’re cooped up in a gas station for a prolonged period, walks through snow and cold, and a broken furnace. And stuff like that.

Lastly, but actually the first post I did since last time, I talked about how I’d like to have something like PBS / Kickstarter to raise money through the blog (donate X, get a Y) but I’m still working on what I could give back in order to do that instead of just desperately begging for money. (Spoiler alert. My next post will be me desperately begging for money, expect it tomorrow.)

–Co-authored by the Slacktiverse Community

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3 thoughts on “This week in the Slacktiverse, January 4th, 2014”

froborrJanuary 6, 2014 at 11:37 am

“On geek culture” is interesting. One point I think it’s missing is the presence of intellectual property violations in all this. Take bronies for an example–I am in the process of running some surveys to compare their purchase of official licensed products to fanworks, and would not be at all surprised to find out that the latter represents the bulk of fan purchases. (On the other hand, bronies have a very high output of fanworks for the size of the fandom, so that finding may not hold for other fandoms.)

The use of geek identity as a pseudoethnicity makes a lot of sense; folklore is a significant factor in defining an ethnic identity, and commercial media have largely replaced the folk culture. Not surprising, therefore, that just as people have found ways to construct folkloric artifacts from commercial media (such as fanfiction, fanart, and filksong), they have built folk communities around those media as well.

Not all, no, but most. Which is why intellectual property law needs to change, but that’s a separate issue–the main point I was reaching for is that, yes, people are constructing their identity based on capitalist products, but via anti-capitalist methods, so I’m not sure it’s that much of a problem.